Real-time delivery of media over communication networks, such as the Internet, consistently strains network operators' ability to reliably and efficiently deliver data in a timely manner. The proliferation of data intensive services, such as streaming audio and video media, Internet content delivery, video conferencing and other services, often creates transmission capacity shortages on many types of networks. The proliferation of high bandwidth end-user equipment, such as digital subscriber line technologies and cable modems, demonstrates the consumer demand for broadband services continues to grow and further exacerbates shortage of network capacity related problems such as latency issues and delivery failures. Communication carriers continue to upgrade backbone and switching systems. However, the growth in media demand is often outpacing network operators ability to upgrade network transmission capacity.
Communication carriers often lease network lines, or portions of the capacity thereof, to corporate subscribers. Various services have been introduced to satisfy different customer needs. Best effort services are deployed for customer transmissions that may be categorized as low priority and not adversely effected by transmission delays. Best effort transmissions across a medium may be preempted by higher priority data and may be delayed until sufficient network capacity exists. High priority transmissions may have dedicated portions of a transmission medium, such as a fiber optic medium, statically allocated and dedicated to particular types of data transmissions such as video conferencing. The bandwidth allocated may be set-aside and unavailable for other data transmission types such as email or Internet content delivery. By dedicating a portion of a transmission medium capacity, the customer knows precisely how much data may be delivered at a given moment and allows the customer to plan and allocate data transmissions accordingly. However, services having a statically allocated bandwidth often result in network under-utilization. For example, a customer leasing a transmission medium and subscribing to a statically reserved service class may frequently not perform transmissions across the portion of the medium dedicated to a particular transmission class. At other times, transmissions across the statically reserved portion of the medium may only consume a fraction of the bandwidth that is reserved. The remaining portion of the reserved bandwidth is then idle and represents an under-utilization of the medium capacity. During the times when the reserved bandwidth is not utilized or is under-utilized, other lower-priority transmissions may be preemptively delayed or dropped although the totality of data being transmitted by the medium is less than the full capacity of the medium.